The Melodrama of Mobility

Women, Talk, and Class in Contemporary South Korea

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by Nancy Abelmann

University of Hawaii Press

Due/Published October 2003, 376 pages, paper

ISBN 082482749X

How do people make sense of their world in the face of the breakneck speed of contemporary social change? Through the lives and narratives of eight women, The Melodrama of Mobility chronicles South Korea's experience of just such dizzyingly rapid development. Abelmann captures the mood, feeling, and language of a generation and an era while providing a window on the personal and social struggles of South Korean modernity. Drawing also from television soap operas and films, she argues that a melodramatic sensibility speaks to South Korea's transformation because it preserves the tension and ambivalence of daily life in unsettled times. The melodramatic mode helps people to wonder: Can individuals be blamed for their social fates? How should we live? Who can say who is good or bad? By combining the ethnographic tools of anthropology, an engagement with prevailing sociological questions, and a literary approach to personal narratives, The Melodrama of Mobility offers a portrait of the experience of compressed modernity in an Asian setting.

"An unusual and important contribution to the growing ethnography of class, especially as it plays out in the intimate relations of family and gender. Nancy Abelmann powerfully demonstrates the many ways in which the political is personal, and vice versa." -- Sherry Ortner, Columbia University

"In this beautifully written book women's lives do not sit still; they move through time, change before our eyes, follow their hearts, change their course, and are moved by traces of their own past as they chisel new pathways for themselves. The Melodrama of Mobility is tribute to passion, courage, and culture." --Carol Stack, University of California, Berkeley